Momentum
by Arugentine
Summary: [MxM Pairing.] Things don't just happen, they build up.


Warning: MxM pairing. Unbetaed. Characters are not IC according to their individual games. Also, unnecessarily long and fractured. This is the longest one-shot I've ever written.

Notes: Heheh. Mario x Peach OTP! No, just kidding. I love them, though.

**Momentum**

As soon as he was inducted, Peach took it upon herself to personally give Marth an extensive tour of the castle. What she really did was lead him up a long, strangely isolated flight of winding stairs while she hitched her skirt up to avoid 'getting it dirty, oh my' and made a great show of her vivid red mushroom-patterned underwear. Justly disturbed, he abandoned her halfway up and heard her throw a fit at the top.

He became lost shortly after in the labyrinth of hallways. All the rooms were identical, built of stone and decorated with mismatched tapestries. Clutching at the Falchion nervously, it was a wonder he found the empty library at all. The air was damp and ancient, the marble floor matted with a years' worth of dust, and the flowery carpet, sapped of vivid color, laid a tasteless mesh of grays. It smelled like the mage's quarters in his castle – watery tea and ancient crackling pages of magnificently adorned text.

"Marth! Oh Sir Marth! Where are you?"

He dove for the chair, and the edges of his cape disappeared behind it just as the solid wooden door slammed open. Marth, in quite a post-panic stupor, looked dumbly down at the bewildered face of the boy whose lap he had just jumped into.

Peach took a cursory, distasteful look at the bookcases. "Have you seen a new swordsman nearby, Roy?" she asked, hand resting lightly on the copper doorknob. "I was showing him around but he got lost. Oh my!" she exclaimed, spotting the soiled state of her white embroidered satin gloves, "It's filthy here! I don't know how you can stand it!"

The boy bent over to pick up the volume Marth had knocked out of his hands and said, "No, I haven't, Princess." Marth edged backwards and almost fell. The redheaded youth grabbed his collar and held him stationary with one hand, while propping the book against Marth's knees and flipping to page seventy-three with the other. "Perhaps you should go check the cafeteria."

"Oh, good idea!" she replied excitedly. Her pink heels clacked down the way. The door slammed behind her heavily. The dust rose three feet off the floor before settling down.

"You're the new inductee?" the boy asked before Marth could apologize. Under a head of fiery, unruly hair, he had eyes bluer than the sea. It was almost disconcerting, how bright and vivid they were in close proximity. It never occurred to Marth to move and the boy never asked. "I saw you fighting. You're very good. My name is Roy; it's a pleasure to meet you."

---

Two days later, Marth held his breath and curled into a neat little ball with his legs folded against his chest under the desk. He had tried the cafeteria, but that escapade resulted in a messy food fight brawl. One could only stay in the men's bathroom for so long without vomiting. His attempt in the training room had been in vain; Peach found him almost immediately and offered to help, flashing cleavage and inches of leg.

"Please hide me," Marth had said in desperation, bursting into the library so suddenly, stray papers flew. There was a crazed look of a hunted animal in his eyes.

Roy's reading glasses fell half a centimeter down his nose. "Uh, okay?"

When she could, Peach avoided the library like the bubonic plague for the sake of her perfectly-ironed dresses and her pristine-white gloves, but infatuation was not infatuation without determination. Face set into a practiced flirty pout, she rapped on the door lightly before kicking it wide open - delicately, of course. It swung on its rusty hinges until it hit the adjacent wall.

"Yes?" asked Roy without looking up, swinging his feet as he thumbed through the chapter.

"Roy," she trilled the name in a sing-song whine, "Have you, by any chance, seen Sir Marthy?" Balancing on her toes as she bent forward, she clasped her hands together and pressed them to her chest to create the perfect image of a maiden in obvious distress.

Roy's eyes were fixed on the printed passage. "No."

The line of her cherry-red mouth thinned. "Are you sure?"

Roy lifted his head and looked at her over the copper rim of his glasses. "Yes."

"Well," she said, placing a hand on her smoothly curving hip and tapping her plush bottom lip in an exaggerated show of thought, "If you see him, tell him that his Princess Peach is still waiting for him to teach her how to properly counterattack in close-range situations, and that she's available every day except Tuesdays from seven-thirty until nine. Would you?"

Indifferently, Roy watched her bat her eyelashes. "Sure."

"Oh, thank you!" she squealed, twirling where she stood and sending him a blown kiss.

The young swordsman waited twenty seconds after she left to bend over the table and, upside down, peek at Marth, mischievously grinning while his bangs fell away from his eyes. "Hey Sir Marthy," he greeted, laughing at the other swordsman's pained groan at the affectionate nickname. "Princess Peach wants to spend some time privately 'training' with you."

Marth, rubbing the bridge of his nose, muttered, "So I heard."

---

For lunch, there was macaroni and cheese on a flower-printed paper plate. It was steaming, dripping with a generous amount of melted cheddar, and orange. While Marth politely spooned some into his mouth, chewing it thoughtfully, Roy stared down his plate like it was an animal about to pounce and elbowed Captain Falcon to his left. "Hey, hey," he said, glowering at the mass of unidentifiable substance, "What exactly is this stuff?"

"It's not so bad," Marth said, dipping his spoon into the foreign food again.

"It's bright orange!" Roy protested fervently, still looking at the pasta warily, holding his fork like a formidable weapon. "That's not natural!"

"Peach cooked it on Mario's suggestion. It's popular where he comes from!" the stocky Captain exclaimed, ending the statement with a fist pump, a pound on his chest, a flamboyant salute and an enthusiastic muscle flex that the teen completely ignored. At the end of the table, Bowser scowled before swallowing the dish, plate and all, while Nana and Popo watched in awe.

Roy laughed as Marth's face visibly darkened. "Don't make that awful expression," he scolded, using his spoon to reach across the table and pat the worried wrinkle away on the prince's forehead. "Didn't anyone ever tell you that your face will stick that way?"

Marth glanced around for a hint of powder pink. His search was fruitless. "But don't you think I was a little too harsh?" he asked apprehensively, eyes darting around like an alleged criminal before finally returning to rest on his companion's youthful face. Roy's brows were raised and his mouth was curling at the corners in a barely-concealed smile. "I mean, I was rather frank."

Roy twirled his spoon between his index and middle finger, shrugging. "It was true," he reassured, using his right elbow to push the unappetizing dish away. "You might've been blunt, but I don't think she'd get anything unless you told her bluntly. At least, you weren't rude about it. Honestly," he said, clapping both hands onto his seat in impish amusement, "I've never seen anyone reject a girl like that.'"

Marth frowned, flicking a drop of cheese at the general's head which Roy easily dodged. "That's not funny!" he said with a rapid blush that tinted even the base of his neck. "I couldn't put it any other way, so stop laughing!"

Roy raised his voice into a fake tenor and held the back of his wrist against his forehead in a mock swoon. "Oh, Princess, please don't be so _sticky_!"

"I hate you," Marth said miserably.

---

The dreams began two months and four weeks after he was inducted.

"Do you think it's because it's been a while since you've had a woman?" Roy asked after a short pause, sitting in hardwood chair by the library window while the autumn foliage fell outside like a shower of petals. Echoes of cheers from an ongoing fight were carried by the wind from the arena into the small room.

Marth shrugged, running his eyes over the shelf on the east wall for interesting titles.

Roy rose to his feet, bent over the sill and suggested, "You could go into the city. Some of the others go on the weekends when we don't have to fight. They say the women like foreigners. I think you can get a woman there for a while. We can't afford to lose too much rest here, or you'll fall behind."

Marth's eyes caught on a particularly old book that was more a collection of torn pages pressed together by two cardboard backs than a book at all. He dusted the cover off, glanced at the gold-turned-brown title, and opened it to the first frayed page, handling the dry and yellow pages with a scholar's care. "I don't know if I would do that," he said absentmindedly, balancing it in the crook of his arm while using the other hand to skim a random passage. Roy looked up from where he was trying to balance a dusty hardcover on his head. "Use a whore, I mean."

Roy tilted his head curiously, catching the book with a deft hand. "Oh? Do you have a woman you've promised to stay chaste for? That's right; you told me you had a fiancée. Is she the one you dream of?"

Head lifting, Marth said, "Actually, I've never looked at the face."

Roy's eyes widened incredulously. He laughed, filling the small cubic space with the sound. "How can you make love to someone," the boy said between fits of chuckling, "to someone whose face you've never even seen? She must be very, very good then, to keep you that distracted!" With emphasis, he waggled his eyebrows at the prince in jest.

Marth rolled his eyes at the crude humor and returned to the less mocking confines of the book, where the author spoke of an epic adventure to an unknown island where he came across a breathtaking maiden that he instantly became enamored with, and was currently trying to woo to the best of his endearing, fumbling, head-over-heels-in-love ability. He closed the volume and looked for another.

"You should look next time! If you can take your eyes off her other assets long enough to!" Roy laughed again, tears of mirth gathering at the corners of his blue eyes, and leaned backwards until he almost fell out the window.

---

Marth barely found a spare fraction of a second to parry the other swordsman's attack and the sound of slick steel crashing against fire-worn iron beat like a soldier's march in their ears. The breeze smelled like smoke and singed silk; Roy was always a bit dangerous to spar with. The edges of his charred gloves began to turn to ash while heady exhilaration and adrenaline pounded through his veins.

"So I was thinking," Roy said, albeit a bit breathlessly, face vivid and flushed.

"Don't hurt yourself," Marth quipped effortlessly, dodging two out of the three sudden thrusts Roy aimed at his abdomen and retaliating with a sly under-the-waist slash that forced his opponent to jump a good four feet back.

Roy rolled his eyes and repeated, "So I was thinking." He charged while Marth read the tension in the fine muscles and the careful footwork with a trained warrior's eyes. He met the downward slash and threw his weight against his sword to shove the boy back. "That maybe I know a way to get rid of your obsessive stalker who doesn't get the point when it slaps her in the face."

Marth frowned. A blonde and pink blur was seated on the sidelines, waving enthusiastically. Daisy fanned herself and more than once told her sister to 'please shut up' in vain. Roy smirked at the temporary distraction and Marth stumbled back when the Sword of Seals chipped the edge of his chest armor and almost pierced flesh.

"Cheater," Marth frowned, brushing himself off.

"I was serious, though," answered the other, back curved and knees slightly bent as they circled around each other, waiting for the perfect moment. "Don't you want to know what I've planned? I'm only doing it for your sake. You should thank me for being such a good friend."

They charged simultaneously and met in the center in a test of raw strength. Roy bit the bottom of his lip and slowly, but surely, began to best the prince, boots scraping across the dusty cement. Marth would've fallen to his knees had he not gracefully hooked his foot behind the boy's ankle and quite literally swept him off his feet. Roy landed on his back and lost his breath. The sword fell from his hands.

With all royal elegance he could muster in his ragged and exhausted state, Marth lowered the tip of his blade and held it an inch away from the general's bare throat. "Tell me this amazing plan of yours."

---

"You bow like this," Marth said and bent at the waist, tucking one arm behind and one before his stomach before straightening again. Mario could only fold half as much. His lack of height and his ample amount of stomach were determents. Marth swore that the little Italian man creaked when he eased from the gesture.

"Alright, now, you take the lady's hand like thi...umm, Roy, come over here for a second." Roy looked up from where he had been picking at the prince's embroidered pillow and obeyed, amused. "Like this," Marth instructed, taking hold of the general's fingers and kissing the knuckles lightly with closed eyes. Roy burst out laughing, clutching his stomach, when Mario tried to imitate and his mustache tickled the sensitive skin.

Three days later, on a particularly sunny Saturday, Marth crouched in the happily green bushes and picked at the twig trying to impale his arm. "Are you sure we should be doing this?" he asked Roy's back anxiously while his right leg began to cramp.

"Oh!" Roy exclaimed, rustling the bush, "He's approaching her! He's approaching her!"

Marth crossed his fingers and peered out of the foliage. They watched Mario, mustache trimmed, hair combed, golden buttons shiny, as he neared the pink princess reclining on a beach chair in the lawn, bemoaning her fate to be scorned by the love of her life. He held his breath, heard Roy sharply inhale and follow suit.

"Princess!" Mario greeted suavely, waiting until Peach lifted her hand from her face to cast him a cursory glance. The plumber bowed and kissed her free hand humbly, bending on one knee. "It'sa me, Mario!"

"Oh Mario!" Peach suddenly threw her arms around his chubby neck and began to wail. Ganondorf sneered. Fox looked up from his game of soccer and Falco took the opportunity to shoot a goal. Kirby took a five-second break from wolfing down a five-person meal. "All the men in this world are so cruel! Nobody loves me!" she cried shrilly.

Mario blinked and dropped the yellow daisy he had been planning to give her to the floor, abandoning the plan he had earlier contrived with the prince. Awkwardly, sincerely, and purely based on instincts, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders and patted her back comfortingly. "Shh, shh, Princess-a. It'sa okay. I still love-a you!"

Peach drew away, eyes bright with big watery tears and meekly said, "You do?"

Mario nodded steadfastly. "Always!"

Her bottom lip quivered, and she drew him near. "Oh, Mario! You're the best man in the whole wide world!"

Marth felt heaven's gate open, heard the angel choir sing. Roy was silent before he said, "We didn't teach him that."

---

They found an abandoned marble chess set under a stack of crumpled papers under the table in the corner. Marth came across it one day when the heel of his boot slammed into it while walking. It was antique but not yet archaic. A rook and a king shattered when they accidentally dropped it, but there were enough extra pieces to easily replace them. On Sundays, they played from late afternoon to suppertime and never grew bored.

"Where did you learn to play?" Marth inquired.

Roy, resting his chin on his folded fingers, shrugged, lifting a hand to capture an unsuspecting rook near the left side of the board, adding it to the small pile near his right elbow by the dried-out inkwell. "My mother taught me. Don't your parents play?"

"Ah, well, they did," Marth said softly.

The redheaded boy lowered his gaze humbly. "Oh, sorry." A brief touch against his skin brought Marth's attention to the hand Roy had laid on his forearm in apology. The general slid his hand down and patted the top of his palm reassuringly. The warm, calloused fingers dragging from his elbow to his wrist in the cool library air made the hairs on his nape stand rigid and goosebumps prickled his skin.

"Don't…don't worry about it," Marth said shakily, eying the bodily contact.

When Roy leaned back, he did not remove his hand. Over the next few turns, it remained in place. Marth felt the fleeting weight as if his skin were hypersensitive and found it immensely distracting, but he dared not even twitch. It took him three minutes to make his next turn: a bad move that left his remaining castle in precarious vulnerability.

"Checkmate," Roy said cheerfully, and several seconds later, Marth's king had no where to run and so fell, the kingdom long gone. "You weren't playing as well today," the boy commented once he finished tucking the pieces gently back into their cushioned spaces, leaning over the table to lay a hand on the prince's forehead. "You don't have a fever. Are you alright?"

Struggling to breathe again, he croaked out a feeble, "I'm fine. I'm okay. I'm just tired." He stood abruptly, pushing the chair away while it sluggishly resisted on the carpet. "I think I'm going to go back to my room and rest now." It was a bad excuse; they were both aware of that. He dodged to the side and quickly fled, leaving Roy, with the chess box still in hand, standing alone in the room.

---

In the middle of the night, Marth snapped awake and pushed himself up on his elbows, letting the cream covers fall away like the last vestiges of his hot and muggy blurry-edged dream. There was no moon; the sky was masked by a layer of ominous clouds. He ran a trembling hand through his sweat-matted hair and closed his eyes while trying to catch his breath. His heart threatened to burst out of his ribs; it was almost painful.

He clenched his teeth in a silent moan when his arousal accidentally brushed against the arm resting on his thigh. His brain was sleep-muddled, but vaguely aware of the repercussions of this indulgence. Reason failed to cooperate, however, and he put off thinking until the morning, which was hours away. Guiltily but desperately, he slipped his hand under the cotton blanket and lost himself to the sinful friction.

He only knew that it was not his fiancée at home, who he had met once each year since he was a little boy and liked none the better. He had not heard her voice, and she would never call his name with such emotion. She would not grip the mattress until her knuckles whitened, in fear of breaking her painted nails. She would not spread her legs if he asked; she would make him beg because she was cruel and brought up in a cold-hearted world that made her haughty.

The lips he had kissed were not soft and pliant, but dry and scalding and unyielding. He remembered bending over the smooth angled arch of a scarred back, kissing down the pale spine from nape to shoulder blades, winding his arms around the thin, lithe body in frenzied passion that bordered on madness. He remembered hearing a moan punctuating each second as the sheets contorted around the body beneath him. He remembered gasping heavily while his movements became quicker, became harder, and barely being able to breathe when the encompassing heat moved up while he thrust down to meet halfway. It was dizzying and hot and wonderful and amazing and he would do anything to feel it again.

Writhing on the bed of his room, he tensed until all his muscles were sore and stretched taut, crying out a name in the secretive dark. Not even he heard it as it left the threshold of his mouth, but it echoed infinitely in his head like a haunting mantra.

In the bleary non-reality of his dream, he had forced his eyes open between the waves of drowning pleasure, turned his lover over, and looked into the lust-ridden face.

---

"Why have you been avoiding me lately?" Roy asked, sitting across the table as they spooned the not-so-delightful delight-of-the-day mechanically into their mouths. Around them, the other fighters were absorbed in their own conversations, varying from shoe-size to homeland customs. He lifted his eyes to Marth's face expectantly while moving the spoonful of chocolate pudding around in his mouth with his tongue. Swallowing, he wrinkled his nose in disgust. "Ugh, this is too sweet. People in Ness' homeland like this?"

"If you don't like it, then don't eat it," Marth said automatically, accustomed to the banter.

Roy glared at him accusingly. "Don't avoid the question too."

"What? I'm not avoiding anything. I don't know what you're talking about," Marth replied innocently despite knowing full well what his friend meant, poking at the soft substance with his spoon. In his opinion, it didn't look safe at all. He turned it over a few times and found what looked like one of Donkey Kong's hairs near the bottom of the plastic cup. His appetite was quickly dissipated, and he set the silver utensil down with a finalizing clink.

"You do know," Roy said determinedly, setting his pudding down as well, but not before licking the remnants of the desert off the back of his spoon. Marth carefully averted his eyes to look at Pichu pilfering the cookies off of Ness' tray, but saw the pink muscle dart out via his peripheral vision nonetheless. His grip on the seat tightened painfully until he was sure he was going to snap off a piece. "I haven't seen you much for the past week. You haven't even come to training. You used to come everyday."

"I'm just tired lately," Marth dodged skillfully, taking a pause to stand and dispose of his finished meal. With his back to his friend, he closed his eyes and willed himself to calm.

"You sleep more than I do," Roy countered once Marth returned, eyes narrowing until he looked feral and strangely alluring. That was a thought quickly smothered. "You eat breakfast before I even wake up, and you leave the cafeteria before I finish dinner. I know you don't go anywhere afterwards except your room, because I've tried looking for you."

"No, believe me. I haven't been avoiding you at all. The fatigue is just catching up with me," he said easily, which was impressive. Roy, seeing the firm line set on the other's carved porcelain face, finally nodded, dismissing the subject politely without further commotion. The movement of his head, however, was curt and dissatisfied. He leaned back on the hind legs of his chair without a word, but he looked at Marth so flatly that the prince was positive that he knew it was a lie.

---

It was a stone hallway, once foreign but now familiar through past visits and accumulated fond memories. The door to the library was closed when his feet involuntarily brought him before the weathered wood. It was relatively warm when he laid his chilled palm against its smooth ridges. He heard the crackling of a dry fire inside and had it not been for the very faint sound of turning pages, he would've thought that Roy fell asleep on the velvet chair.

Roy read aloud when he thought no one was listening. Marth had been witness to it the few times he had laid his head on his table and feigned sleep. Now, Roy was mumbling something in ancient Latin, tongue curling around the old, old words with hesitant and meticulous care. Marth closed his eyes, resting his forehead beside the door's rusted hinges until he heard the reading abruptly stop.

The clock chimed nine. "Are you afraid of talking to me or something?" he heard Roy mutter crossly as the general's feet dropped from the table to the carpet. "I swear I won't get angry if you just tell me what's wrong. Did I anger you somehow? Did I do something stupid? That's all I want to know. I'll apologize and you'll stop this stupid avoiding thing."

Eyes widening, he retreated a step and the heel of his boot unknowingly hit the hard floor with a clack. His heart jumped into his throat as he heard Roy rise and approach, closing his eyes in doomed apprehension, waiting for it to open. His throat and mouth were irritatingly dry. He did not know what he would say to the angry face, the accusing words, the set and clenched jaw. He knew that if he found the words, he wouldn't be able to anyway.

Ultimately, he didn't even need to; the door remained forbiddingly closed. Roy was waiting, Marth realized slowly, and clenched his fists so tightly in hopelessness that they began to quiver at his sides. The general was, at most, a few feet away and the only thing between them was an old rotting door.

That was enough. With a finalizing sigh, he turned and walked away in shameful cowardice. His footsteps fell one after another and sounded in the empty air until he turned the corner and ran towards his room, where he fell on his covers and for long hours did nothing but stare at the white cracking ceiling while his chest heaved to catch his breath and the room filled with the white noise of the heating system's buzz.

In the library, Roy looked down at the floor, turned away and resumed reading. _And in winter, frost blooms like the clean white lily; the trees grow bare and die_.

---

By the middle of the next winter, Marth's restraint was worn paper-thin.

He found Roy once again in the library. When he was sure they were alone with no one within a twenty-meter radius, he pushed Roy against the wall and kissed him, effectively stopping the steady flow of angry questions the other had been asking. The boy-general's head snapped back and hit solid stone with a dull-thud that elicited an utterance of pain, quickly swallowed, lost in the lack of space between their mouths.

He ran his hands down Roy's sides until they found the general's loose fists. Interlocking their fingers, he pinned the other's hands where they hung. It had been entirely too long since even casual contact. He had shied away from the youth for nearly three weeks.

The kiss left him weak-kneed and he leaned against Roy while tucking his face against the blue and gold collar. The clothes first smelled like the industrial-brand detergent the cleaning maids of the tournament facility used. Underlying that standard lemony-lime was the faint scent of metal and flame and foreign winds.

There was a long, pregnant pause in which Marth waited with baited breath. The room was painfully still, while the electric light flickered weakly, until a badly-placed book fell off a high shelf and hit on the floor with a loud bam. It fell on its binding, almost splitting in two, the pages flying open in a sudden flutter. Marth felt Roy jump in surprise.

"I looked at the face," Marth finally explained minutes later. It came out like a whisper, half-breathed and afraid. "Like you told me to. I looked at it a month ago."

"Oh," said Roy, bland and unmoving. "And it wasn't your fiancée?" He asked the question much like one would ask, 'And how do you do today?'

"It was not my fiancée."

Weak-willed, Marth gave into the temptation of licking the hard line of Roy's jaw, drawing a soft moan that he might've imagined, had it not been for the tightening of the boy's throat. Impatient and tired of waiting, Roy took this as a cue and ducked his head, pressing himself closer. Winding his arms around Marth's neck to draw him down, he planted gentle, fluttering light pecks on the edges of the prince's open mouth. Marth felt him smile, and cupped the other's face in his hands while his mind attempted to catch up with his heart.

"Oh," Roy said between kisses, punctuating it with a hint of tongue that left the other speechless. "Oh," he repeated while artfully kicking the door beside them firmly closed with the back of his foot, and sighed. "Well, _finally_."

----

_The larger the momentum, the harder it is to stop. _


End file.
